Cinema Nearer to the Earth by Jean-Claude Biette (1982. Translation by Ted Fendt)

There is, I believe, in all of Jean-Marie Straub’s films, an active mixture of two passions: one for politics and one for aesthetics. The first is based on hate, the second on love. In these films, hate is the driving force behind the political passion, love that of the aesthetic. Passions are very much at stake, and this appears as much when the films are violently refused as when they are adored: those who reject them are not confused about what they are rejecting. Two kinds of characters or figures exist between these two poles. The positive ones, who are either resistance fighters – characters that are so strong as to not be entirely lucid (the grandmother in Not Reconciled) or that have a lucidity that exceeds reality (Moses) – artists (with a great capacity to resist) – Bach, Schönberg – or resistance writers – Brecht, Pavese, Fortini (with, in this last example, the chance of being able to put the writer face to face with his writing), and the other, negative ones – bankers, lawyers, soldiers, men of power, agents of repression and democratic opportunists. I’m setting out here a separation and a notion that determines even the contents of Straub’s films, as I interpret them. But love and hate are not pure and one-sided with the first matching the positive characters and the second matching the negative ones. On the other hand, hate isn’t the only complexion that the political passion takes (Straub loves the oppressed), nor is love the only complexion the aesthetic passion takes (he hates clichés, shots that don’t rhyme with anything, superfluous shot durations, and pornography). Love and hate are directly linked and they trade back and forth, but this mixture of two passions – whose exact composition is unknown – is precisely what guides the more or less great success of Straub’s films. Because they both belong to reality and they both express themselves, they are what create this new reality that is the film. Politics and aesthetics are also directly linked in these films even though in public Straub always places politics before aesthetics, which doesn’t exactly describe the reality of his films or the more and more sensual character that is becoming noticeable. More and more, the most beautiful sequences move away from the political passion and get closer to the aesthetic one, and thus we have Too Early, Too Late which comes out today and can be summarized as the combination of two documentaries, one on the French countryside, one on the Egyptian countryside.

If we look at the entirety of J.-M. Straub and D. Huillet’s work, it seems that the most significant film is Moses and Aaron. It contains all the figures from the other films and dares in its excessiveness a fusion of politics and religion (a possible metaphor for the aesthetic), and it shows the struggle between a rather positive character (Straub seems to favor the intransigent spiritual guide, Moses, politically) and a rather negative character (Straub doesn’t like those who make compromises in order to be understood) while entrusting to the aesthetic the work of regulating this duel and attacking directly the political impulses locked within Schönberg’s libretto. As a rule, the aesthetic has to count only on its own forces in order to tackle “politics.” Thus, there exists in Straub’s films (with what one can guess is Danièle Huillet’s vigilance) a capacity for engagement (and, thus, of withdrawal as well), sometimes by way of a political decision, sometimes by way of an aesthetic decision. If I have separated the positive and the negative characters in a very basic manner, it is under the pretense of considering the fact that in practice such characters find, by passing through Straub’s cinematographic device, a more complex existence which they had the potential for in the source texts, and then these are, first of all, in the present in which the spectators live, filmed actors. Once incarnated by the actors, even the negative characters resist (against the ideological traps identified by Straub in the texts and offered by the characters that bring the texts to life) and in the aesthetic process executed by Straub. He takes off his toga of hate (politics) in order to put on his toga of love (aesthetics).

At a certain point, the term “politics” proves to be insufficient. Let’s replace it with “history.” Traces and inscriptions have been talked about a lot in regards to these films. Everything that bears witness to and guards the memory of human actions is the made the subject and the very substance of these films. Can one film history? Straub tries hard, in any case. But isn’t the cinema the art of the present? If we rely on the examples provided by major films, it would appear that before being a matter of essences or nature, it is an aesthetic process. I believe that this conception of cinema as the art of the present dates back to the translation – or the critical realization – by Jean Renoir of Chaplin’s cinema and, maybe above all, of Griffith’s. Charleston (Charleston Parade), La Fille de l’eau (Whirlpool of Fate), and La petite marchande d’allumettes (The Little Match Girl) are films that return to Griffith and develop, in French culture (while suppressing the fictional), what is most profoundly linked to the present: the living truth of the actor. And the art of the present is, in this process of recording via the image (and then via image and sound), that which, within the actor, reaches for or claws at something, that which puts up a fight. Straub’s cinema comes from this Griffith-Renoir movement. The same aesthetic is involved, with the difference beginning at the moment when history provokes in Straub a mixture of love and hate such that all the rigor of an aesthetic is not too much to overcome and resolve it. This resistance of the actors – and we know what traps are placed under their feet, above their heads, etc. in this cinema – is what allows this element of fragility, this degree of mortality to appear in these “negative” characters. They share this with the “positive” characters in the form of bared arms, exposed necks, voices pushed to the point of fatigue, faces drained from the effort made to speak and haggard from lived experiences (what professional actors can rarely give in the ‘cinema-as-art-of-the-present’ aesthetic). That the positive and the negative characters are treated in the same, quasi-documentary manner in their cinematographic inscription allows the love-hate tension on the political side to be resolved in the love-hate tension – strictly aesthetic – between history and the present, between traces (on stones, on paper, that one can read – Fortini – or decipher – Bach, Schönberg) and obstacles: the actors placed in between the text and the anti-naturalist memorization, between the energy that they would like to freely employ and the obligation to submit to the mysterious and implacable orders of each shot.

In the French countryside, Too Early, Too Late shows us roads, fences, pastures, fields, cows, villages and market towns, as well as the sky and clouds, and we hear, captured by the direct sound, all sorts of noises and bird songs. In the Egyptian countryside the film shows us the land grown wild or covered in planted vegetation, paved and unpaved roads, waterways, walls, a railroad track, fortifications, a factory and lots of workers coming out, women, men, and children who come and go, peasants who are going to work or coming home, bikes that pass, mopeds, cars, trucks, and carts, and we hear with all this, in direct sound, in addition to events than we can’t see (an extraordinary far-off rumble, like a continuous bass hum). Too Early, Too Late is composed of panoramic shots in which the rotating movements capture the elements of the “scenery,” stopping and re-starting, including and excluding, by some kind of cryptic decision, the individuals in the shot, admiring them as they pass by. The grass, the clouds, the sky, the light, and the movement of the human beings establishes the present, the only element of the show. And this time, no one is speaking in front of us. Where then is the history? It is, first of all, in the first shot of the film, outside of the country: something of a reminder of the worst, the Place de la Bastille, filmed as we have never seen it, overrun by the perpetual movement of cars. And it is in two commentaries spoken, if I may say so, off screen. For the French countryside, a text by Engels that is an account of the beggars in certain French villages before 1789 and, for the Egyptian countryside, a text extracted from a book (by Mahmoud Hussein) published by Maspero relating the history of Egypt and its efforts to escape from colonialism. History is also in the extracts of Egypt’s official archival footage, the images and sounds of which are integrated into the continual flow of the film.

What is history’s role in this film? It consists in employing not a tension that would be able to confront the aesthetic violence of the Straubian project, but a pressure that only sets in motion a quantifiable movement of signifieds. The Marxist discourse (even if it is partly Engels’) menaces these landscapes; it determines a path to the people that we see, just as much as capitalist exploitation in the case of the French peasants (made present by graffiti on a wall) and colonialism (and neo-colonialisms) in the case of the common people and the members of the underclass in Egypt is supposed to, in this film, menace them and determine their path. It even goes so far as producing a sort of very unpleasing shock when we hear the signifier “repression” at the moment that we see a police officer stopping some children from going near the camera. This means that the desire to give meaning (here, during the length of a second, and in a more constant manner by the commentary) does not manage to find any grounds for communication with the aesthetic project and, thus, the political-aesthetic tension is not constructed, but imposed. The shot of the Bastille and the archival footage, however, participate in a genuine construction of this tension. So much the worse for us! Nobody will be able to explain why John Ford insisted on reverence and solemnity.

Let’s consider what is splendid about this film. It is a pure documentary the way that Playtime is a purely comedic film. Too Early, Too Late exists through its own secret rhythms, formed by this series of panoramic shots. The lesson, today, is no longer about history, but about shots – how does one film these landscapes? A strange mixture this time. Love is inseparable from the awareness of beauty, and hate remains (almost constantly) off-screen in order to watch over what this, possibly guilty, beauty doesn’t invade. The Griffithian feeling about nature is no longer what surrounds a Renoirian inscription of bodies. Here, it goes further. It is possible that the next Straub and Huillet film will be taken from a real novel.

                        Jean-Claude Biette, Cahiers du Cinéma, 1982

August 25, 1943

Miss Mildred Martin

Philadelphia Inquirer

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Dear Miss Martin:

I feel extremely sorry that my picture Heaven Can Wait has caused you two such uncomfortable hours.

I am not writing this letter with the intention to make you reconsider your criticism - nothing is farther from my mind. I am merely writing this letter to point out to you that several times in your criticism you resort to what one calls in sports circles a "foul."

In order to support your argument against me you feel it necessary to refer to the "Berlin born director." Not that I am trying to conceal my place of birth, but I feel at this point in your review the reference to my birth place is a little dragged in by the heels.

The purpose becomes very clear when in the next sentence in regard to To Be or Not to Be you call attention to my "callous, tasteless effort to find fun in the bombing of Warsaw."

Being an experienced newspaper woman you are surely aware of the effect such an allegation must have on the reading public, particularly at a time like this. Such propaganda is not very gracious, but when it is based on false facts it becomes outrageous.

Naturally, your statement that I "find fun in the bombing of Warsaw" is completely untrue. When in To Be or Not to Be I have referred to the destruction of Warsaw I have shown it in all seriousness; the commentation under the shots of the devastated Warsaw speaks for itself and cannot leave any doubt in the spectator's mind what my point of view and attitude is towards those acts of horror. What I have satirized in this picture are the Nazis and thier ridiculous ideology. I have also satirized the attitude of actors who always remain actors regardless how dangerous the situation might be, which I believe is a true observation.

Never have I said in a picture anything derogative about Poland or the Poles. On the contrary I have portrayed them as a gallant people who do not cry on other people's shoulders in their misery but even in the darkest day never lost courage and ingenuity or their sense of humor.

It can be argued if the tragedy of Poland realistically portrayed as in To Be or Not to Be can be merged with satire. I believe it can be and so do the audience which I observed during a screening of To Be or Not to Be; but this is a matter of debate and everyone is entitled to his point of view, but it is certainly a far cry from "the Berlin born director who finds fun in the bombing of Warsaw."

I repeat again, I have no quarrel with your opinion of Heaven Can Wait or my ability as a director in general, but I feel I have a right to protest against such insinuations which are so completely contrary to my real beliefs.

Sincerely yours,

Ernst Lubitsch

("5. Let's also report that several mentioned Night and Fog as 'beyond competition'; this work, according to them, cannot, by its nature and its object, enter into competition with other films.")

--quoted from Jdcopp's

Dominique Laborer

Work, Leisure

Dominique Laborer

Manufacturing and Service.

Kino Slang always hopes for dialogue. Our gracious thanks to Cicat Cailhronnat for his recent letter of great insight, in text and image...

Hi Andy,

Your exposition of Irving Lerner as an adherent to the Worker's Film and Photo League was important to a better understanding of his work. I find it ironic that the same studio that shamefully crushed distribution of Losey's M eight years before would support Lerner's work - maybe it was the death of Harry Cohn in early 1958 that made it possible for the studio to make pictures with Lerner. Lerner's pictures for Columbia - City of Fear and Murder by Contract are both obsessed with imagery from vehicles and with the specificity of the built landscape.

There are so many striking and intelligently photographed images of the automotive landscape in City of Fear, and it seems that Lerner knew the city, or worked with someone who knew the city well. I thought I would contribute three images (out of many) that produce the optical unconscious of the film.


In 1959, California mandated that the Department of Public Health set standards for emission and control of air pollution, so the appearance of air cops would have been a perfect dodge for the Feds. Here we have the scientific police at work, casually sampling the Los Angeles atmosphere for radionucleotides. The insignia and identification of the side of the vehicle: "Air Pollution Control - Enforcement Patrol."


Here is a quasi-pov shot of Vince Ryker, already exposed to a lethal dose of cobalt, cruising through south Hollywood, top down, wind in his hair, and through the windshield, we see a truck ad for Spike Jones Musical Insanities of 1958.


Finally, what may be the slyest of shots, another cruising image, another pov. Despite the exceptional quality of the photography, the pov trope gives some of the film a kind of home movie quality, the quality of being in and examining public space - the same sense we often get from Thom Andersen's films. There is a power to the liberty of this kind of seeing, which is at the other end of the spectrum from surveillance video. The shot is looking downhill at the intersection of Wonderland Avenue and Lookout Mountain Avenue. This is Laurel Canyon, before Morrison, Joni, before John Holmes. And what is fascinating in retrospect is that this location is less than a mile from Lookout Mountain Laboratory, the military's "secret" facility for preparing and processing photography of the U.S. nuclear weapons program. This facility was busy developing images of the Hardtack series of 'plein-air' nuclear detonations (which, in a series of 72 explosions, tested the response of over 18,000 G.I.s to various levels of radiation exposure - more ominous and undisclosed than the testing of prisoners in City of Fear) even as Lucien Ballard was perched in the backseat of this Ford in the hills above the Strip. Just another register of the "vast State secret that rumbles beneath ... the narrative..."

Cicat Cailhronnat

CITY OF FEAR: GET OUT OF THE CAR!

--The 1959 film by Irving Lerner written about in a recently revised piece here

--Thom Andersen's tremendous new film; He writes a commentary for it here; reads as a lively stand-alone essay on rhythm and blues and Los Angeles history, Chicano culture, 16mm filmmaking...

O SOMMA LUCE di Jean-Marie Straub

FILM IS ONLY A REFLECTION

 OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE

by Luc Moullet

Many people take the habit of current cinema as laws imposed by the profound nature of the cinematographic spectacle: thus the breaking up of the film into tiny fragments, the consistency f the dramatic situation and the developments of the camera, the musical filler, shimmering images, the abundance of sets, the audibility of the dialogue, the notions of a beginning and an ending, the credits, the willful scam (even in excellent films like LA GUERRE EST FINIE the principle of the scam is respected, a principle which consists of insuring that actors and fiction be taken for real characters and action) are only the expression of the civilization of petty bourgeois who arrange beautiful paintings on their walls. It is a cinema of masks: the filmmaker avoids difficulties by means of artifice; he hides reality – their reality – from himself and from the spectator through decoration and apparent order. Current cinema artificially reintroduces beautiful elements in a universe which is unaware of this beauty. When I go from the Gare du Nord (Euston Station) to the Gare de l'Est (King's Cross), I don't pass through the Bois de Boulogne (Hyde Park). Still it's pretty. Well, most filmmakers pass through the Bois de Boulogne. In this way they offer a false conception of life. They make the exploited person believe that beautiful external elements can be integrated into his sad actual life. Insofar as the discovery of beauty creates happiness, it is important to discover true, rather than false, beauty within normal life.

That is why repetition – the same gestures without obvious interest, daily washing, shaving, dressing, walking – variety – the lack of dramatic ordering of the human day – the absence of poetry – modern decor and rhythm of life, invasion of the Civil Code – all must be sources of emotion, interest, and beauty. Modern music (Antoine, Dutronc, Gall, Sheila 62 and 66, Vartan) offers an example by basing its beauty on anti-poetical words and sounds and on repetition. I would even say that the value of a film is connected to the degree to which it creates beauty through repetition, and that the aim of cinema is to allow the spectator to pee every day in the literal sense without getting pissed off in the figurative sense.*

Analysis, opposition, reflection, all methods are good. I prefer exaggeration: the careful accumulation of uninteresting elements provokes a certain dizziness, a source of beauty and humor, which allows us to beat the modern world and its henchmen at their own game, to anticipate their absurdity, to disconcert and thus to defeat them. That is why in shot 163 (c) of BRIGITTE ET BRIGITTE, Colette Descombes says that it's logical for man to "prefer human absurdity, to which he must contribute in order to adopt it."

The predominance of bourgeois values in films originates in the success of the cinema of the past: the first filmmakers all became big businessmen. Then, in order to enter the milieu of cinema it was necessary to belong to an equivalent milieu. That's why 41 % of Frenchmen, but 0% of filmmakers, have a father who is a worker or an agricultural wage-earner; 71 % of filmmakers but 7.8% of Frenchmen have fathers belonging to the upper classes of society. Today [1967], the minimum salary of a director is around $9000.00. He shoots a film every two years, on the average. Nevertheless, only 6% of the French earn more than he does. Wherefore the crisis of the cinema: as long as the salary of the director is not identical to the earnings of the average Frenchman, he will be cut off from the average spectator and from reality.

Add to that the betrayal of the other sectors of the C.G.T. and F.O. (organized labor) by the actors' and technicians' unions: The industry bringing in so much, they require gigantic salaries (an average of $160 a week) and personnel which the State tends to render obligatory, even for small-budget artistic films. Thus directors, having to spend more, are forced to respect commercial demands, derived from tastes which the bourgeoisie impose on the exploited class, with the help of advertising, demands which they wouldn't have to respect if films only cost what they were supposed to. They are forced to avoid taking political or artistic risks.

Currently, leftist labor unions glorify right-wing films which alienate the exploited class, like LA GRANDE VADROUILLE or IS PARIS BURNING?, films which cost millions of dollars and bring in plenty. They sabotage incisive films which only cost $10,000 or $20,000 and don't bring in much. An actor who resents being offered $240 a month as a travelling salesman wouldn't even suspect that this contact with reality would make him a better actor. As with the novel and painting, 70% of the time film must be a moonlighting job, in which a person condenses what he's acquired in the course of his main work. Pecas or me, Patelliere or Godard, we're too professional, too marked by the cinema to give it new blood: Everyone, agricultural worker, baker, coal-merchant, dock-worker, elevator-operator, fireman, garage- mechanic, hospital-attendant, ice cream vendor, journalist: there aren't any. knife-and-scissors grinder, locksmith, miner, nickel-plater, office-worker, postman, quiz show host, railroad worker, secret agent, ticket-puncher, urbanologist, veterinarian, watchmaker (there aren't any), must make his own film. Each person can realize a good film at least once in his life. Therefore, access to film-directing for 50 million Frenchmen must be facilitated, especially since there is room, each year in France, for thirty films costing one million dollars, but also for at least five hundred feature length films costing $6000.

Today, if a studio film like BRIGITTE ET BRIGITTE costs much more, a French feature film made under normal conditions, without useless expenses (remember that insurance, the office, and the staff are the founding fathers of bankruptcy) costs $9,800, $6000 with real ingenuity (but I think by 1970, with a little bit of organization we'll be able to arrive at this figure normally), $3000 for 8mm (a format sufficient for 200-seat theaters). We must democratize the cinema. Here we have a prodigious possibility of growth for culture, for industry, which can’t help but develop through the multiplication of clients, and also for employment: 500 films, that’s 4000 new jobs.

The more the stooges of diverse bourgeoisies and trusts – Messieurs Goebbels and Fourre-Cormeray – struggled against the free access of the individual (Jew or amateur) to film production, the more the individual rebelled, wanting to take up the challenge and do the forbidden thing. That is why we mustn’t protest the absurdity of the current cinematic policy, which will one day produce a hilarious comedy, and which has already given us a good laugh. If a National Center of the Novel were created, many more people would all of a sudden want to write. There are disadvantages, but many more advantages to the fact that the current status of filmmakers is identical to that of smugglers.


– Cahiers du cinéma, No. 187. Translated by Sandy Flitterman. From the FILM AT THE PUBLIC program, "The Cinema of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet", November 2-14 1982.

*This is an untranslatable pun on “se raser,” which is slang for “being bored.” (Trans.)

Yesterday...

...we suffered a severe loss to the cinema today: William Lubtchansky died.

Reflections to come. Craig Keller has written a preliminary remembrance which, for him, needn't stretch back further than the morning before the great cinematographer's passing. And for me too, not a day goes by that I am not thinking of one or more of the films or videos that Lubtchansky shot: Ici et ailleurs, France/tour/détour/deux/enfants, Le Pont du Nord, Too Early, Too Late, Sicilia!, Les Amants réguliers, Itinéraire de Bricard. And there are 2, 3, 4 titles between each of these towering works that are, and will remain, part of daily operations.

Photo: Lubtchansky, Huillet and Straub shooting Klassenverhältnisse (CLASS RELATIONS) in Hamburg -- 1983 -- by Caroline Champetier. Below, Une visite au Louvre (2004, Huillet and Straub and Lubtchansky).

May Day

Commemorating the birthday of Danièle Huillet, who would've been 74 today, a photograph by Caroline Champetier of a dog (unknown!), JM Straub, Willy Lubtchansky and Huillet during the shooting of the French part of TOO EARLY, TOO LATE (1981); and another by Sebastian Schadhauser of Renato Berta, Straub and Huillet shooting GESCHICHTSUNTERRICHT (HISTORY LESSONS, 1972).

MAY DAY

A VERY YOUNG FILM (SOCIALISM)

Article: "Explication Through the Trailer"
(of FILM SOCIALISME - JLG, et al.)
by Arthur Mas and Martial Pisani
English Version thanks to Craig Keller.

Godard, Kael,
Spanish Republicans, Stalin,
Dziga Vertov Group, Bezhin Meadow
Mr. Arkadin, Mr. Hulot,
Gold, Gold,
Children, Animals

YOUNG PEOPLE

YOUNG PEOPLE, 1940, by Allan Dwan

The film in full here

Written on the wind...

"I travel through countries awash with blood..."

FILM SOCIALISME

MADE IN USA

"Appreciates the physical-mental exercise of seeing of movies like these...," said the amateur boxer Pedro Rufino.

ANTIGONE (1991)- Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub

Charles Burnett: "Well, I think it’s being aware of (children), and also respecting them. There was an incident I remember where I was trying to tell this little girl how to drink this water and come over to her father. So I’m telling her, I sort of bent down to her level, took the water, 'walk like this,' sort of crouching down at her level. Then when I said action she did exactly what I did, she crouched down and walked over to her father. I said 'no no no', and I get down on her level again, did the same thing, and she did the same thing. I didn’t realize she was imitating me crouching down. I was just trying to get down to her level. So I realized it was my mistake and I stood up and said 'this is what you do.' So from that moment on I learned you can talk to kids like they’re adults and they understand perfectly what you’re talking about."